A printer is an essential computer peripheral that provides printing services to a computer user—whose computer is connected with the printer by providing hard copies, or printouts, of documents. Such documents are usually created or edited using application programs installed on the computer like word processors, spreadsheet programs, or drawing tools. For the printer to be able to provide the printing services, the computer also needs to be installed with a printer driver associated with the printer. A printer can also be connected to a network and therefore provide printing services to computer users whose computers are also connected to the network.
For practical marketing and business reasons, the printer market is segmented and printer manufacturers typically design their printers to meet the needs of computer users in each printer market segment. Examples of printers sold in some market segments include home printers, office printers, network printers, wide format printers, large format printers, inkjet printers and laser printers.
Most printers can only provide printouts of documents using print media, such as paper or transparencies, of commonly available, or standard, sizes. Due to other physical constraints, such printers would also only be able to handle print media not exceeding a maximum size. Hence, each of these printers is known to only work with, or support, print media in a range of standard sizes peculiar to that printer. For example, an above exemplified wide format printer can generally make a printout of a page of document using print media having a standard size not smaller than the Index Card size and not larger than the Super B size. In a typical create-and-print sequence, a printer driver for a printer will first report the standard media sizes that the printer supports to an application program in a computer connected with the printer. The application program will in turn make these media sizes available to the computer user, who will subsequently select a suitable media size for formatting a document. In formatting the document, the computer user, among other things, defines the media size and a corresponding imaging area on which a page of the document is to be created. When a printout of the document is required, its printing information is sent to the printer driver. The printer driver then processes the document's printing information—including converting it from its initial form of drawings commands into raster information, and then into printer language—before sending it to the printer for producing the printout.
The selection of media sizes which the computer user can choose in the application program and format documents with, therefore, is largely dependent on the media sizes that the printer supports. For example, if the printer supports print media up to a maximum size, then documents that are created using the application program cannot be formatted with a media size larger than this maximum media size. In the case where documents preformatted with a media size larger than this maximum media size are edited using the application program, the printouts of the documents may be made only with some form of shrinking or truncation to their printing information.
In an effort to add value to printers sold in the various printer market segments, printer manufacturers are turning to innovative technologies to provide new and useful printer features and capabilities. For example, the HP DeskJet 1100C Printer from the Hewlett-Packard Company provides a ZoomSmart scaling technology that enables a computer user to produce enlarged or reduced printouts of documents without the need to reformat the documents. Therefore, in the above situation where a document was preformatted using a larger media size, the printing information for the document can be reduced using the ZoomSmart scaling technology. A printout of the document can then be made on a print media of a user-determined media size that the printer supports.
While printers with such a new and useful technology are widely in use and meet most of today's sophisticated computer users' high expectations of printing services, they suffer from limitations. The ZoomSmart scaling technology provides computer users the option to divorce the media size used to format documents from the size of the print media with which the printout of the document is made. However, such a technology does not cater to some specialist computer users' need for accuracy and fidelity in a printout of a document formatted using a large media size. One such group of specialist computer users may be computer aided design (CAD) application programs users.
Drawings created using CAD application programs are typically formatted with large media sizes, for example D-size. In formatting drawings with such large media sizes, the CAD user is presented with a corresponding large imaging area to work in. If an above-mentioned wide format printer is used to provide printouts of these large CAD drawings, where the printer is unable to support print media of such large media sizes but is value added with the ZoomSmart scaling technology, several things may take place. Firstly, the printing information of the CAD drawings may be reduced. Then the printouts may be made on a smaller standard media size that the printer supports.
An important consideration that most CAD users have when they use a printer to provide printouts of CAD drawings is whether a square-inch of drawing detail in the large CAD drawings could be printed accurately as a square-inch of drawing detail on the printouts. If such printouts are reduced, they are considered inaccurate and undesirable.
Accordingly, it an object of the present invention to provide a printing system for providing a printout of a page of document formatted with a media size that the printer does not support. Substantial accuracy and fidelity can therefore be advantageously provided in the printout of a page of document formatted with a large media size.